WordPress 2.8 is now available! Named “Baker”, in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker, the new version of the popular blogging software comes with several bug fixes and improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. The most notable chance in WordPress 2.8 is speed.

Though it looks much like the previous stable version (WordPress 2.7),  WordPress 2.8 fixes over 790 bugs. The ability to browse themes from within the dashboard will definitely catch your attention. Now you can browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard. In my view, this is a nice feature will save your time. Also, there is all new CodePress editor to help you in editing your themes or plugins from your dashboard. It comes with built-in syntax highlighting and function lookup. So, no more accidental errors while editing themes or plugins!

After some change in style and scripting now admin pages loads faster. The widgets interface also got a complete facelift in WordPress 2.8. Now, you can do many things with your widgets! For example, you can edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets. Other new features of WordPress 2.8 includes new widgets API, ability to arrange dashboard widgets in up to four columns, timezones support and automatic daylight savings time adjustment, ability to configure the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options, etc.

More than 180 new features, changes, upgrades and improvements makes WordPress even better. After a quick test on my local server, I found that WordPress 2.8 is really better than it’s previous versions. Soon, I will update all my blogs to WordPress 2.8. What about you? Are you using WordPress for blogging?

via: WordPress Blog

A good email marketing solution is a must if you want to achieve success with your email marketing campaigns. Right now there are many companies that offers email marketing software or services in the market. But you must choose your email marketing solution provider carefully. Because you don’t want to jeopardize your email marketing campaign just because of your service provider’s fault. Also you need to take care that the service quality is good and the cost is within your budget.

Looking a reliable and affordable email marketing service? Try iContact, an on-demand email marketing service that allows small businesses and corporate giants to create, send and track email newsletters, autoresponders, surveys and RSS feeds. Based in Durham, North Carolina, iContact was founded by Ryan Allis and Aaron Houghton in 2003. Currently the company have more that 48K customers including big Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America, Ford and Nissan.

iContact have a very user-friendly interface and to help you create your email marketing messages they have more than 300 pre-made email templates. So, you will never find any problem while creating your email messages. Once your messages are ready, you can send them immediately or schedule them to be sent at a later date. They offers open and clickthrough tracking, so that you can track the performance of your email marketing campaign in real-time.

You can easily create, organize and manage your mailing lists with the help of their subscription management tools. They take care of managing bounces and unsubscribes for you. Moreover you don’t have to worry about adding sign-up forms, surveys, autoresponders, RSS feeds etc. Because iContact is a full product loaded with all the sophisticated tools and features required for email marketing. You don’t have to worry about deliverability issues, as they have good relationships with the ISPs.

What about the price? One can start using iContact service for as little as $9.95 per month. In my view this is cheap for a full-fledged service like this. Well, based on the size of your list, the price will go up. For big organizations, they also have a special Enterprise product that starts at $660 per month.

So, iContact is a very easy to use, reliable and affordable service. Want to try it before you buy? No problem! They have a 15 day free trail offer. Within the trial period you can send 250 messages to up to 250 subscribers without paying a cent. Moreover in order to give you the complete picture, they will provide all the features of a paid account during the trial period. To sign up for the free 15 day trial of iContact Email Marketing service visit www.icontact.com today.

Link building is an important aspect of blogging, specially when you want to make money online with your blogs. Link building is not a tough job. You just need some patience and some hard work. You can get some good links to your blog by using various white hat SEO methods such as blog commenting, forum promotion, article marketing and link exchange. I know most of you are aware about all these stuffs and I am not going to bore you with a long article about all these things. Rather I would like to tell you about a simple Firefox add-on that will help in link building and SEO.

The add-on that I am talking about is SearchStatus. What actually it do? It displays Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete Rank of any domain name right within your browser. So, what’s the big deal? This add-on comes with some powerful features that you can use to spy your competitors and to improve your own blog. For example keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and many more.

You will be able to realize it’s power only after installing it on your browser (Firefox off course). Just get it from here and install it. Once it is enabled, you will see it in the bottom right of your browser. You can also change it’s position to some convenient place, from the options menu. Now browse the web as usual. When you are on a web page, it will automatically get information about the Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank of that particular page or domain, and displays them unobtrusively on your browser. You can enable or disable these ranks anytime.

How to use SearchStatus for link building? I am sure that you would love to get some nofollow free i.e., dofollow links. For this you need to know where you can get one. You have probably came across some dofollow blogs and even directories of dofollow blogs. But, mind it, many bloggers are cheating fellow bloggers by announcing their blogs as dofollow, when their blogs are still using nofollow on links!

So, how to know who really offers dofollow links to it’s commentators? Let’s use this Firefox add-on to get some good links. Right click on the add-on icon and select the ‘Highlight Nofollow Links” option. From now on when a web page uses nofollow on links, it will highlight the link. Go to blogs and post comments when you see no highlighting on comment links. Similarly use some brain and get good nofollow free links from relevant sources. So, with this add-on no one can cheat you about dofollow links. Just continue posting good and relevant comments on dofollow blogs and soon you will get a bunch of one way links to your blog.

In my view SearchStatus is a powerful add-on and it is a must for every blogger. I am using it for last few months and getting extremely positive results on some of my new blogs. Besides using for detecting nofollow links, I use SearchStatus to get a quick overview of a new site. It saves lots of my valuable time. If you are not using it right now, try it today. I am sure that it will become one of your favorite Firefox add-ons.

Want more inbound links? Need some advice? What about from Google itself? Google’s Maile Ohye recently posted on the Google Webmaster Central Blog that natural and good quality inbound links are always beneficial and can affect your PageRank.

Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance.

On the other hand Ohye also pointed out that inbound links from spammy sites are of least or no importance from Google’s point of view.

Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

Ohye also added that if you have quality content or unique service, you will definitely get quality inbound links. That’s that point that most experts tells you. And now, it is mentioned on an Official Google Blog. So, this is the time to get serious! Teach your readers new things, uncover latest and interesting news, be entertaining or insightful, show your expertise on a topic, provide a useful product or service and make your site worthwhile.

Need a new avatar for yourself? What about a dynamic avatar with your personal touch? Cool? Then, you must give DoppelMe a try. DoppelMe is a free online avatar generator and offers some exciting features to make your avatar interesting.

On DoppelMe, creation of an avatar is very easy. First it offers you to choose gender, skin colour and eye colour of your avatar. And then it offers a number of options to choose expressions, hair, eyewear, hats, tops, bottoms, shoes, accessories, background and extras. Just follow the instructions and design your own personalized avatar.

Once your avatar is ready, you will be given information on how to incorporate it in various places like blogs, forums etc. You can also download your avatar to your computer. By default the avatars are provided in GIF format. But, you can also request PNG format just by changing the “.gif” portion of the image URL with “.png”.

Well, registration is not necessary for trying the avatar generator. But having a free account will enable you to save your DoppelMe online and to log in and make changes at any time. As a member, you will also get many more items and expressions to use on your avatar. The interesting point is that you can create groups using your own DoppelMes and or those of your friends, family, team, gang, clan etc etc.

DoppelMe is a dynamic avatar generator. You can put you avatars in blogs, forums, instant messenger and anywhere in the internet. And depending on your mood you can change your avatars right from your DoppelMe account. Try it today.

Want to try a new Twitter-based application? Take a look at Dwigger, an interesting tool that enables voting and threaded conversations on Twitter tweets. That’s why people have started to call it a mixture of Digg and Twitter! Dwigger is powered by VaroCMS, the same platform that powers VideoShift and it really looks great.

So, how to start? First log in to Dwigger by using your Twitter username and password. Then, you can post the URL of any Tweet that is already on Twitter or simply write a new Tweet from Dwigger. That’s it, the Tweets submitted by you are now open for public votes and comments. And you can start a new Dwigger conversation thread via SMS. All you have to do is send the SMS to “dwigger” Twitter user account.

You can also take part in existing conversations that appears on Dwigger by giving your own comments and votes. On Dwigger, the threaded comments are Tweets and your Dwigger comment will be posted as a reply Tweet. If the comment you are posting contains more than 140 characters, only the first part of your comment will be displayed on Twitter, followed by a link back to your full comment at Dwigger. And the interesting part is, you can vote up or vote down any conversation. The highest voted Tweets of the week are shown in the frontpage sidebar of Dwigger.

Dwigger also shows what the World have been talking most about in the past few days, in the form of a word cloud that they call as ‘Zeit Cloud’. The more frequently and recently a word is used by Dwigger members, the bigger it appears in the Zeit Cloud and by clicking a word you can view all the Dwigger posts that contains the particular word. Try it today!

Want to start a contest on your blog? Need some professional help? I think, you can give ContestMachine a try! ContestMachine is a new web service, that will make it easy for you to run a contest or promotional giveaway on your blog or website. They will provide you a cool contest widget that you can display on your blog and collect entries of your visitors. In my view, this is a cool idea. What you think?

Running a contest or giveaway with ContestMachine is very easy and involves only four steps. The first step is to create your contest or giveaway by setting the entry requirements and dead line. The second step is add your prizes and customizing your widget. Once your contest widget is ready, you need to embed it on your blog or website. That’s the third step, where ContestMachine will collect entries from your users. And tin he last step you will have to select the winners. That’s it!

ContestMachine contests allow you to choose winners based on entry content, and award prizes. Even you can manually disqualify those entries that do not meet your entry criteria. So, virtually you will be able to run and manage your own contest, without spending a lot of time. There is no limit on total number of entries entries and even they offers Email Opt-In service.

They offers three types of accounts - basic, monthly and annual account. The basic account costs you nothing. But the number of promotions per month is limited to 2 and there is no Email Opt-In service. On the other hand, monthly and annual account holders are charged $8.95/month and are allowed to run up to 10 promotions in a month. The annual account holders can run 50 contests per month and are charged $90/year. Both monthly and annual accounts includes Email Opt-In service and are allowed to export entries as a CSV file.

The basic free account is ok to start testing their system. But the drawback is that, you will not be able to export the list of entries as a CSV file and there is no way to let participants sign up for your email list. So, decide on the type of your account, as per your own requirements and enjoy running your blog contests in an interesting way!